> if they can't pay the hundred bucks the government won't I sure don't care
I used to have this same mentality. Until the person who was renting one of my properties decided to lie about certain issues (like claiming a shampoo bottle lodged down one of the toilets was there for years). When I decided to not renew the lease with that tenant, they decided to cause considerable damage to our property.
Sometimes, when things come easy to people, they don't appreciate it. Holding people accountable helps them lift themselves up too.
Anyone who thinks anything comes easy because you're poor hasn't been poor except in the poor college student "working" their way through the college daddy is paying for type of poor.
Your experience points to the human race sucking not poor people.
There is a significant difference in incentives, though. How many well-to-do people get evicted? Not a lot. And if they do, they can probably afford a higher deposit on their next apartment to offset the perceived risk. And they probably have the money to pay market rate, or above market rate, to get somewhere to live. And even if they can't find something fast, they can probably afford to get a hotel or an AirBnB for a little while so they have somewhere to sleep at night. They will likely keep their job through an eviction to maintain a stable employment record.
People living in poverty don't have those luxuries. Their chances of having an eviction record are higher. Their ability to pay a higher deposit are drastically lower, since just staying alive consumes basically all of their paycheck. The chances of them being able to pay above market rates are basically nil; their chances of being able to pay market rates are not great. If they get evicted, there is a significant chance they end up homeless. There is a significant chance their new circumstances will result in them losing their job as they struggle to find somewhere to live, because priority 1 is not sleeping in a shelter (which I absolutely understand). To add on to that, they might have children who also follow them into their new circumstances. 28.9% of children below 50% of the federal poverty line experience an eviction before they turn 15, and 25.6% of children between 50% and 100% of the federal poverty line experience an eviction before they turn 15.
All of which is to say, the possibility of eviction is far more threatening to people living in poverty. Their lives are not cushy even when they have stable housing. I can absolutely understand that losing their housing could be the straw that broke the camel's back, and they lash out irrationally. I don't think they suck. In fact, they're probably stronger than I am, I don't think I could endure the things they deal with on a daily basis. But I also don't discount the possibility that they react more vehemently to losing their housing than someone who has less to lose.
This is a situation where I think the private sector does a poor job of handling the situation. In a market where there is perpetually more demand than supply (who has a housing glut, other than Detroit?), there is always going to be some bottom percent of less profitable potential buyers who get screwed. For non-necessary goods, this is fine, but not for housing. I don't think any first world countries should have citizens that have persistent worries about how long they will have a roof over their heads.
You "It's not what you did, it's that you lied"ed a tenant who lied to avoid being kicked out, in order to justify kicking them out?
Yeah, it sounds like moralizing to avoid coming across as ignorant of class issues. However, ironically, it gives you away, because people who think that's excusable are generally ignorant of class issues.
The funny part about that shampoo bottle is that it's the same kind that they keep over the toilet in the cabinet... The reaction when I showed them the bottle was priceless.
Why did they lie? They feared you would kick them out? The horror of that conversation? You are ofc not responsible for the formula but... The most productive approach is probably to beg you for mercy at your feet?
No clue why they did. It was one thing after another, so it wasn't just the bottle issue. After a few inspections and things not being well kept, I decided it was best to not renew.
Do you honestly believe I expected them to beg for mercy at my feet? You need a reality check. The problem is that you don't fully understand the situation, the background, etc.
Of course you don't expect that. You should pick the best candidates within the parameters of the law. Your laws put them at your mercy. Here in the Netherlands it is almost the other way around. (not ideal at all)
And yes, from your comments we cant understand nor judge the situation at all. Even if you would describe it in great detail it would merely be one side of the story.
People can at times end up in a downwards spiral of crap. A mix of stuff that is their own fault and things they couldn't do anything about. At some point one may throw the hands into the air and get careless and sloppy about it. You should obviously get rid of people like that but it isn't like they stop existing when you do.
I think you have a very misguided idea of what it's like to be a landlord....and perceptions of who/what 'landlords' (a very unfortunate term) are from some tenants... no good deed goes unpunished etc. Plenty of great people around but you have to be very careful who you rent to...
For most of my adult life (now I'm 34) I have spent 30-50% of any paycheck I've received on rent.
In my country (Ireland) over the previous two generations, houses went from dirt cheap to extremely expensive. In the generation that came of age in the late 80s and early 90s, you could work a normal job and buy a house, easily. If you had a good job, you could buy several houses.
Now, my generation. We came too late. Houses now cost so much that you will be en-debted to a bank for life if you buy one. Now we have a rent crisis. For many people, they can barely even afford to rent a house and buy basics like food. Meanwhile, anyone who was lucky enough to be a bit older and smart enough to jump on the property wagon when it was cheap, they are rolling in money. They earn thousands of euros from doing essentially nothing except be born in the right generation.
It's very hard not to look at them, look at the hardships of the people my age who struggle to pay rent, and not think of landlords as social parasites.
This is a problem for our generation actually. The two generations before us became rent seekers about everything and from what I can see %90 of current population is unable to acquire significant income to buy anything meaningful. We are going back to feudal times, with minority of population owning everything and others paying for the privilege of using them.
I think a big part of this is that suburbanization created a tremendous amount of (government subsidized via infrastructure) value that in many metro regions has all been scooped up now. There’s not much left to build outward, no arbitrage, and not enough political will to fix it (or: too many people benefitting from capturing the value).
And in combination globalization/corporatization has put a lot of high paying jobs in a small number of areas.
In my opinion it’s basically generational warfare or at least a hidden retirement tax paid for by professionals in booming cities for old people who happened to own property in those cities. Even if you don’t subscribe to that hot take, it should be uncontroversial that property values massively outstripping wages in some areas reduces quality of life and contributes to inequality.
I wonder if the current behavior can change if majority of companies start allowing remote work for a wide area of job families. I think we are already starting to see this in Bay Area with the introduction of remote work in leading tech companies.
Affordable housing/having roof over your head is a massive problem for everyone but the super wealthy. House costs in the western world are wildly out of whack with median incomes and whether you rent or own a disproportionate amount of your income is gone on this. The 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' house flipping and rental era did enormous damage to society, giving the illusion property owners are primarily rent seekers. (Slightly ironic on HackerNews since so many are now paid for working on software for rent rather than being purchased outright).
The reality of owning rental property is often one of breaking even and spending money for repairs and new appliances that must be done now, as opposed to when you have the money in the bank for your own place. Finding good tenants is like Russian Roulette. A friend's mother died and she rented the house to a man without doing proper background checks. He showed up once and was never seen again after saying a 'friend' would move in some furniture. That 'friend' was a woman who changed the locks, never paid any rent and was seen bringing large packs of dogs in by neighbors. After months of expensive litigation the woman suddenly left on the eve of final eviction. The house had been trashed with every room used to keep dogs in for her 'dog walking' business. The place stunk and there was drug paraphernalia and needles everywhere. It cost thousands more to restore the house to livable condition. Horror stories like this are not uncommon, These are not 'rent seekers', just ordinary people renting out houses and flats, often under considerable financial stress themselves. Another (also female) friend answered a home wanted ad on a lamp post for a section 8 person and rented a small unit in her garden to her out of the kindness of her heart. That person then called social services after harassing her 'landlord' and told them the person she was renting from was insane. She made her 'landlord's' life hell for months until she was finally dealt with.
The solution is far more affordable housing but how we get back to that 1960's era English and Irish council housing model I have no idea in the current political and financial climate...
> Of all the investment opportunities available to people, I'm not particular sympathetic to purchasing property to seek rents.
If forbidding renting properties to tenants would solve problems, I would be on your side.
People will always need to rent. A society has to allow them to without allowing them to be exploited. But once you allow renting, you have to protect property owners from tenant caused damage as well.
I'm not saying we're there - we may be far from it. But renting is not only useful, it is necessary.
Think lease-to-buy. That way the tenant has skin in the game. MY house was a school project. It was absurdly cheap to build as the construction workers had to pay to build it. If you account for market value the rent paid for the place 4-5 times by now. If you only take the original construction cost + maintenance its been paid for an absurd number of times, so many times over that I don't want to think about it.
We can at least lower the rent down to zero over [say] 40 years but it would be more reasonable to make the tenant the owner after he paid for the place 3 times over.
The rent would have to increase a lot - why not just take the extra money, invest it and save for a down payment? Much faster than 40 years, tenant can live anywhere and there's no financial entanglement between landlord and tenant along the way.
@majormajor Absolutely. People are untrustworthy on both sides. I've had the stress of being evicted by an unscrupulous San Francisco property shark in the past, and also know people who have had to spend large sums to evict sketchy people and then thousands more to make repairs. It cuts both ways...
When we talk about 'rent seeking' it's usually not about actual rental of property, which fills a very real need in society.
Maybe it's different in other parts of the world but where I live, rent seldom covers the mortgage on a property, let alone all other expenses. The profit, if any, generally comes from capital gains when selling the property (which right now isn't on the cards for pretty much anyone.)
For Germany, the profits usually come from rent itself as well as capital gains, at least in the cities.
I'm a member and live in a housing complex owned by a cooperative. The rent you'll pay in this kind of setting is at the lower end of the market, the services you get are at the upper end. Being a cooperative means I own shares, so I get dividends and balance sheets etc. Even with this great (for renters) setup, they still pay out 4% dividends and expand like crazy (not to produce more dividends but to provide more apartments). They could pay out much more than 4% but they don't want to optimize for profit and make it an investment, the dividends are meant to incentivize members to invest/save more than legally required.
The place I lived at previously had higher rents and less services. I don't know how much of a profit they made annually, but I'm sure it wasn't anywhere close to 4%.
Don't forget that "covering the mortgage" involves building the landlord's equity, so it's not as if this portion is lost to the bank while the landlord has to depend on appreciation. If I "only just cover the mortgage" while renting for the entire term of the mortgage on a house that doesn't appreciate above inflation, the landlord still goes from owning 20% of a house to 100% of a house over that term.
True but there are a lot of additional costs (maintenance, council rates, depreciation) to owning a house on top of the mortgage. Again only speaking for myself but I have a small rental property and the rent basically only covers the interest plus expenses.
I wasn't in it to seek rents, we were nearly breaking even. It happened to be a place I previously lived in and it was easier to rent than to sell during the great recession.
In my experience most people serve their own interests. Commercial enterprises in fact select for those who serve their own interests over morality because those parties are most likely to succeed.
In America you are lucky if your interests coincide sufficiently with the owner class that you can both get along productively. Expecting beneficence as well is unproductive.
Right, but in the case of renters, "serving their own interests" means establishing the fundamental right of having a place to live. That is important at a much deeper level than landlords rights, which involves making money from land and property ownership beyond what is required for their own domicile.
The landlord doesn't provide the place to live, it is already there, and the cost of upkeep is lower than the rent otherwise the landlord wouldn't be able to make a profit.
This is different from, for example, a retailer, who provides the service of gathering things into one convenient place, and does so more efficiently than everyone gathering the things for themselves. A retailer's profits are payment for providing that social utility.
Landlords' profits are mostly a consequence of their holding rights, rather than the provision of any comparable social utility (there are some small efficiencies to be had, but they are not the primary driver of profits).
Property developers (and the people who actually physically construct housing) provide places for people to live. Landlords simply buy/own those places.
Those are almost always different groups in practice though I’m sure you could contrive a counterexample.
A landlord provides about as much value to a consumer as a stockholder does to a public company. Economically the landlord-tenant interaction is primarily a speculative/investment/arbitrage relationship rather than a service
Thus landlords are the one to actually finance those buildings.
> A landlord provides about as much value to a consumer as a stockholder does to a public company.
Which is a significant value, for a company (even if I would like more companies to be privately owned). In this model a landlord is how people can get access to housing without huge initial capital and/or long term commitment.
A rent-based housing economy causes huge problems for those that want to buy an house (somilarly to how Airbnb/short stays cause problems for rent seekers) but this is not about one sector being parasites, it is about an imbalance in the market.
the situation would not be better if landlords did not exist.
Landlords take housing out of supply and extract rents from it. They produce nothing- the house was "provided" already, they just inserted themselves into the process.
That is because the buying process is an artificially inflated burden that reinforces the current system.
Removing landlords would also remove the need for them to exist.
I think you are very presumptuous. I grew up in poverty in a third world country and know what it's like to not eat, and when I did eat, I remember having to pick bugs out of my beans before cooking them.
How do you know this? I think their point remains. Someone who gets a hand out, or wins $, as an example, will probably not appreciate it the same as if someone busted their ass for it.
Also, people often have a short memories when it comes to people that help them out financially. They might remember and appreciate it more if you help them move, or help them learn a craft.
How is that even a controversial statement? It's a well known phenomenon in behavioral economics.
There was a story about how charging some nominal amount for a mosquito net led to more consistent usage and lower malarial rates, than if they just gave the net for free.
Why? Because the "price" of something is a signal as well. If it's free, who cares? If you paid something, well then it's yours and you should look after it.
If you read OP, he chose not to renew their lease and this caused them to do damage. I think the suggestion here is if a landlord chooses not to renew the lease of qualified tenants, the tenants will voluntarily leave.
What counts as a handout these days? A tech job that pays $50k-$100k over productivity? ("The company has been losing money since its founding, but we need a rockstar engineer so we can survive long enough to get bought by Facebook.")
I'm not sure we have any idea of the real value of things these days, including what work is worth. Credit has distorted the system; just because someone who is work full-time (however many jobs that takes) can't pay the rent rate the market seems to be dictating doesn't mean someone stepping in to fill the gap is giving them a "handout".
It is not. They are not "needy." The market, pardon my language, fucked up either their compensation, or the rental rate, or both. This is the failure of an economic system to properly account for a worker's labor and deliver the shelter designated in the social contract, not an oversight or negligence on the worker's part. Especially with unions defanged or non-existent.
The idea that 'anyone who labors is ipso facto entitled to shelter' is new to me in the context of social contract theory. Where does this idea originate?
...Locke's social contract. This is its basic premise. People consent to performing labor not directly related to their survival, and in exchange, the state resolves to provide the necessities that are not guaranteed by that specialized labor. If I work full time and can't afford food and shelter, why would I continue to work? Further, if there are structures preventing me from subsisting, away from a state which will not secure my livelihood in exchange for my labor, why would I not dismantle those structures?
> I used to have this same mentality. Until the person who was renting one of my properties decided to lie about certain issues (like claiming a shampoo bottle lodged down one of the toilets was there for years). When I decided to not renew the lease with that tenant, they decided to cause considerable damage to our property.
Surely the lesson here is that "this person was a criminally inconsiderate jerk", not "all Section 8 tenants are untrustworthy". (cr__ put it more punchily while I was posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23409805 .)
> Sometimes, when things come easy to people, they don't appreciate it. Holding people accountable helps them lift themselves up too.
How does denying housing to someone who needs it help them lift themselves up?
There is a 'blood from a stone' aspect from lower income tenants. If they trash a house and cause six figure damages to your property, your not getting your money back, and typically landlord insurance does not cover intentional damage:
If a rich person or rich person's kid cause this damage. Expect them not to pay and expect lawsuits.
You have to be careful who you rent to. Sometimes someone down on their luck would make a much less demanding and better tenant overall. Be careful chasing away the poor because they actual need your place and may take better care.
Vandalism insurance doesn't necessarily cover intentional damage by tenants on a property.
As a challenge, I would like you to find an landlord insurance policy that explicitly covers intentional damage by a tenant and a price estimate on the internet, because I'm having a hard time finding it!
I'm not sure where you jumped to the conclusion about denying housing. I have no problems with section 8. I gladly accept section 8. What I have a problem with is (and I speak from first hand experience), is allowing someone who is on section 8 to not pay their portion. I allowed this, got burned and learned a lesson.
I thought I was being kind and "helping them out". When, in reality, that individual didn't appreciate it and they didn't take better care of the place because of it. When other factors (e.g. the lying) caused me to not want to renew with the tenant, they caused over 10k damage and flooded my house in retaliation.
> I'm not sure where you jumped to the conclusion about denying housing.
I am sorry that I read too quickly, and misunderstood your point, which I think I now understand. Although I see now that you specifically quoted your parent's point "if they can't pay the hundred bucks the government won't I sure don't care" before disagreeing with it, I reacted too quickly and thought incorrectly that you were disagreeing with the parent's broader point about why it was good to have Section 8 tenants.
I assume section 8 is our equivalent of Housing Benefit. I know plenty of landlords who wont accept HB tenants because properties have come back absolutely trashed before.
I used to have this same mentality. Until the person who was renting one of my properties decided to lie about certain issues (like claiming a shampoo bottle lodged down one of the toilets was there for years). When I decided to not renew the lease with that tenant, they decided to cause considerable damage to our property.
Sometimes, when things come easy to people, they don't appreciate it. Holding people accountable helps them lift themselves up too.